RSVP management tools and carpooling was a match made in heaven. Interesting developments in the RSVP market!

News is that Eventbrite (which is a great RSVP management tool) and Zoompool (a ridesharing platform) have teamed up.

I guess it was a quite obvious integration path as introducing a ‘Mark Read’ button in Gmail, which, in the same fashion, took way too long.

This is a strong move by Eventbrite in the overcrowded Online RSVP market. I am very curious to see what amiando the European counterpart and my personal favourite will do. In the meanwhile here is the press release.

“Events are a great candidate for ridesharing because attendees generally aim to arrive and leave at roughly the same time,” said Donna Horne, ZoomPool’s co-founder.

“If you’re an event organizer who uses Eventbrite for your conference, business seminar, arts, entertainment or charity event, it makes perfect sense to offer ridesharing to your attendees. It boosts attendance and they’ll love you for it.

As an event attendee, ridesharing with a perfectly matched partner is a great opportunity to make a new social or business acquaintance — who knows where that might lead?”

Telepresence is reshaping the world of telecoferencing, with a real time rendering hard to match.

What is Telepresence?

Telepresence is a group of technologies aimed at connecting people far apart instantly with a superbly real time rendering. It consists on a combination of multiple high-definition monitors, cameras, microphones, speakers and custom-made studios. It brings the concept of a video conference forward, revolutionizing interaction.

What’s the trend?

According to Frost & Sullivan Telepresence will grow immensely through 2013 due to the use of new technologies and the need to be connected with colleagues, partners and customers in an instant offering a great human interaction.

Who offers it?

There are several corporations inn the market such a Cisco, Hewlett-Packard (Halo), Telanetix (Video Telepresence), Polycom or Sony (3D Telepresence). Since the need of connectivity keeps growing constantly several organizations like Marriott and Starwood hotels have already made partnership with vendors to improve their business offering.

Benefits

Besides giving the illusion of being in the same room, capturing the body language and giving less exhaustion to users, Telepresence offers much more benefits such as:

- Real time connectivity
- Instant connection
- Sharp sound
- Quality, size and clarity of images
- Doesn’t bother and stress with unwanted latency
- Increases productivity
- Enhances communication

Tell us about your experience

Have you used Telepresence in your meetings? How do you think it will affect the industry?

No excuses then, start broadcasting your event now!

Photo by abbyladybug via Flickr

Oovoo is a video calling service. No difference from Skype there. Although a great, recently introduced functionality is the Video Chat Room.

You can create a room for your event, grab the code and embed it in your event blog/website. Access can be manged by password and you can promote the streaming by simply sharing a link.

Flixwagon is a great mobile streaming alternative. With a twist. It gives you the direct upload to Youtube functionality you were dying for.

Now that you told your attendees about your customized Youtube Channel, you will get a lot of user generated content to increase awareness of your event.

Yaika stands out for its simplicity of use. It serves the same purpose of the most popular broadcasting clients, but with easiness embedded. We loved the chance of hosting an audio only channel.

OK the site looks a bit beta and it is not the quintessential interface you’d expect.

Connecting several webcams at the same time is something that you pay unrealistic amount of money for. Utagoe comes for free, so give it a go.

Livestream is the major competitor of Ustream. Interesting to note the white labeled, pay per view solution. Worth investing for selling video. They just launched TwitCam, which allows you to start broadcasting immediately using your twitter credentials.

Coveritlive is THE live blogging platform. It allows easy and fast content publishing as well as incredibly easy to use media integration and (for the monetizers out there) advertisement publishing.

CamStudio belongs to the record-it-and-publish-it category. You tend to pay big bucks for this kind of software. CamStudio is Open Source and 100% free. It helps you in recording whatever is going on your screen.

Qik is the most popular choice for mobile streaming. A great way to augment an event would be to empower your staff with a qik enabled phone instead of a boring/underutilized/expensive walkie talkie.

By doing that you are collecting precious interaction during the event for the masses to view online.

Audioboo is the iPhone App everyone is talking about. Audioboo records audio and uploads it to your Audioboo account as well as blasting your ‘boo’ to twitter. That is live coverage as it is becoming and iPhones will be major players in this revolutions.

What to say about Ustream. They were online streaming partner of the most popular events of 2008/2009. Among others Michael Jackson’s Memorial and President Obama’s inauguration.

The seamless integration with twitter and now Facebook, make it a fantastic choice for your event. It is extremely reliable and reactive to your hardware, which is what you are looking for in a video streaming software.

Photo by smannium via Flickr

The much discussed role of twitter during presentations, led us to believe that some piece of software was soon to be released.

And there we go, keynotetweet has appeared. It is an open source Applescript that syncs with Keynote and sends a tweet of the notes associated with a slide when that particular slide comes up on the screen.

This is a major breakthrough towards online/offline integration and engagement. Death by Powerpoint is a sad reality. keynotetweet stimulates participation horizontally by making the presenter an active participant in the conversation rather than yet another superstar/mega expert.

We feel that twitter undermines that front lecture style so averse to Web 2.0’s shared knowledge environment. keynotetweet brings it on and we can’t wait to see more software going this way.

The Layar application for Android phones was yesterday released and gathered the attention of the most popular tech blogs.

Layar is the first application to add tangibility to a powerful concept: integrating Online and Offline.

What is Augmented Reality?

Augmented Reality as suggested by Wikipedia:

Augmented reality (AR) is a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time.
At present, most AR research is concerned with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and “augmented” by the addition of computer-generated graphics. Advanced research includes the use of motion-tracking data, fiducial markers recognition using machine vision, and the construction of controlled environments containing any number of sensors and actuators.

What does that mean for event professionals?

A number of things for sure. We mostly see the immediate application within conferences and exhibitions for networking purposes.

- Registering attendees with Face Recognition and associating online social profiles with their virtual badge sounds like a plan. We could soon experiment a live twitter where we can point our camera to an attendee and visualize balloons with thoughts from twitter.

- We could also think about associating a registered attendee with a particular networking/dating need and point the camera at the room to find our matching profile.

- Needless to mention the immediate benefits in terms of Health and Safety as well as logistics. Integrating the floorplan into the application would make it easy to find our way in a crowded exhibition.

- Sponsors at trade shows would be extremely happy if visitors could point their camera at the stand to download all the relevant info as well as reviews and opinions, or maybe special discounts.

- What about pointing the camera to a speaker during a session and be informed about books, shared online presentations and recorded sessions.

When should we expect that?

Sooner than you think.

The fact mobile applications are being rolled out to the market means that the trend could pick up soon.

6 years ago there was no Facebook.

I enjoyed the crowd and we also built a community for the event which I invite you to join.

Julius Solaris @ Masterclass Social Media from punkmedia on Vimeo.

If you can’t see the video click here

If you can’t see the presentation click here

smeepe.net just launched and we are very happy about it.

In the SEO invaded Google and in the tricky jungle of Social Networks finding the right vendor, venue or PR for your event is becoming increasingly tough.

In our 9,000+ members Linkedin Group, we published a special offer featuring free registration for the first 5,000 vendors.

We surely did not want to exclude you from such goodness! So click here and enjoy it!

If you are not sure about what smeepe is have a look at the terrific video they put together!

Here goes a collection of what Julius Solaris, your host, thinks are the best tools to display live tweets at events.

5. Twitter Search + Firefox + ReloadEvery

Twitter Search is the visualization tool for the nostalgic twitter user and/or retro tweep. In order to make the page refresh automatically, Install Firefox add on ReloadEvery. If you don’t have Firefox probably you won’t read this because your browser has crashed in the meanwhile

Goods:
- Suits large screens
- Neat and detailed

Bads:
- Hard to read
- A bit dull, not fun.

4. TwitterCamp

We talked about TwitterCamp in the past. It’s a damn cool project and the fact it was implemented for a BarCamp and on an opensource basis makes it even cooler.

Goods:
- Highly Customizable
- Fun Interface

Bads:
- Could be slow in updates from time to time
- Looks like the project is not moving on

3. Twitter Fountain

What about that! Twitter Fountain looks slick and fancy. Very design oriented and definitely relevant to image conscious events.

Goods:
- Good looking Interface
- Clear and neat
- Flickr Integration

Bads:
- Embed only, does not work as a standalone page or software.

2. Twitterfall

Great Control with Twitterfall. You can play around with settings and have fun with customizing the experience.

Goods:
- Able to opt for a good speed of refresh
- Able to display ReTweets

Bads:
- Although highly customizable it still remains a bit dull

1. Visible Tweets

Visible Tweets is simply fantastic! This is what tweets at events should look like.

Goods:
It’s all good just go for it.

Bads:
Don’t see any.

We’ve all experienced it. The hallways of the conference are buzzing with chatter about the event. Attendees are discussing what’s working, what isn’t, why the organizers planned it this way, what they are happy about and what’s discouraging them.

As meeting and event planners, we often wish we could be a fly on the wall listening to everyone’s discussions all at once. With today’s social media tools, we can engage in discussions with our registrants before, during and after the big event. Now, we can capture those hallway conversations and respond in real time. So, where do you start?

1. Create and encourage a culture of listening.

Listening is something that every staff member can and should do, and the organization’s principals should lead by example. Staff should listen in the hallways, invite feedback on evaluations and encourage attendees to provide comments and concerns to any staff member both face to face and through the social media tools available. The event is all about attendee, not you the meeting planner.

2. Develop a system for capturing feedback and ways to respond.

a. Setup an event presence in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media tools.
In today’s web world, people go to several different sites to find information about an event. They no longer turn only to your organization or event website. They turn to their friends, colleagues and compadres. They also turn to the social media tools they use and you can help them by setting up “listening and chatting posts” within each social property. Twitter Tip: When using Twitter, identify one person to manage each event account and encourage them to list their name in the profile. For example Jeff4CVG09 meaning Jeff for CONVERGE 2009.

b. Decide who will be the champion for each account, keep the information updated and communicate to people within that network about the event.
Encourage the champions to provide outstanding customer service and do the right thing for the attendees when challenges arise. Let your team members know that you will back them with their decisions to provide outstanding customer service to the attendee.

c. Publicize the locations for your listening and chat posts on all your print and electronic materials.
For Twitter, establish a hashtag (#nameofevent). Ask attendees and interested parties to use that hashtag when sending tweets about the event. By using Twitter Search, Tweetchat. com, Tweetgrid.com or other tools, you can follow the back channel and view what attendees are saying about the conference.

d. Identify and refine keywords that you will use to monitor conversations and posts about your event.
Avoid generic words and if your event or organization contains generic terms, use Boolean operators like “and” or “not.”Use Tweetbeep.com to keep track of Twitter conversations mentioning your event and Google Alerts to monitor web posts that use the search terms you identify. Set up RSS feeds to monitor what bloggers are saying about the event as well.

e. Decide how you will analyze the results you capture and share insights with other team members.

3. When “listening” to your customers identify patterns and engage the attendees in conversation.

Use the following simple KD Paine model. If the issue is not a problem, keep track of themes and positives. If the issue is a problem, divide it into two groups, “Big” and “Little” problems. Big problems probably deserve the attention of superiors and your PR team immediately. Fix little problems as quickly as possible, keep track of themes, responses and outcomes, and be prepared to discuss.

4. If listening is an art, responding should be a science.

Once you’ve been listening to your attendees, it’s time to respond. Answer basic questions as quickly and succinctly as you can. If you hear negative feedback, keep your cool. Don’t respond during an emotional hijack and wait until your emotions have settled, 15-20 minutes from the time of the initial shock. Thus the science part of the response. Politely thank the commenter for their negative feedback, ask them how they would like the problem resolved or what they would suggest you do differently. If the commenter has inaccurate information, address that information with facts. Then, most importantly, invite the commenter to continue to provide feedback. Whatever you do, don’t take the conversation offline because there are many others watching the conversation and want to see what you’re going to do. If you’re thankful and respectful to the attendees, even those giving you negative feedback, it will result in a positive experience for all.

In the end, the more you listen and respond proactively, the higher your attendee satisfaction will be. Here’s to the “Art of Listening and Science of Responding.”